Come on, baby. Reignite my fire. OK. Do you see what I did? Atomic kitten. No, the George Dawes. OK. Yes, yes, yes. Look, it's the 20th of January. We've nearly done it. Most people listen to this and nearly at payday. But it's probably been a few times this month where they've questioned, am I on the right path there? And today's theme might just help them. OK, it's all are you thinking? Please don't interrupt me. Would you like me to?

Please, Marko, I'm not going to say a word. you. There's different versions of you.

Isn't there not like you, know you, you've got your, you're a bit of a psychopath. So there are different versions of you, but the Royal you, um, the, the person you are now compared to who you were 10 years ago, completely different person. So there are going to be different versions of you throughout life. And I think it's about knowing that. And there are going to be times where you're winning and you're a high performer and a higher Shiva. And there are probably going to be times where you're losing or you're failing or you're struggling. And that is like.

the learning bit. That is where you kind of rise like a phoenix from the ashes. And we see this in salespeople all the time. They're on top, they're top of the leaderboard. They're always getting up there. They're ringing that bell. They're kind of spinning that wheel. And next month, where is he? Yeah. He sat at his desk. He's eating his chicken. He hasn't rang the bell once. No, exactly. And think about it on a larger scale as well. The average turnover of salespeople is, I think it's something like

12, 18 months, something like that. But what happens is then I'm going and doing a very similar job somewhere else and thinking, well, what I'll do is I'll fix the things I don't like about where I am now and do them somewhere else. But then that same place repeats because wherever you go, there you are. It was right. Yeah. Well, Google it. Okay. but you're right. So a lot of the time you get people coming for interviews and you're like, I've got 10 years of sales experience, but it's not 10 years of sales experience. It's the same.

year, 10 times exactly doing the exact same thing. And I've fallen into that trap before the grass is greener. I've left one job that had a good commission structure, but then I was a bit miffed off about it. And I went somewhere else, promised the world this great commission structure. And lo and behold, it was exactly the same. Yeah, exactly. I think it's that similar adage of like, I'm going to work really hard to get the holiday or the car.

And you achieve the thing in the, probably the set amount of time you thought you would. It doesn't quite feel like you thought it would feel. It's kind of a bit, bit vacuous. I've had that early dopamine here and then I'm coming back and I'm thinking, what's, what's pulling me back to work now? And actually then I'm not feeling particularly thrilled and enthused. And again, this is another link back to why the sales were always big peaks and troughs in performance. It's because of those motivations. They're quite materialistic, often what

the true consistent salespeople do is they focus on a different kind of game that they're playing. And that might be a game of, I'm a fractional salesperson who I'm there to help lots of businesses raise their sales game. And I'm going to take a little bit of the pie from each of them, right? That could be a different game that you play, but probably the most consistent game you can play with yourself is how do I just get a little bit better each day? How do I take apart the skillset and say,

I'm not very good at that bit. I'm going to, I'm going to do, do that. Or I'm not very good at selling to that personality type. I've been selling to marketing directors for so long. I want to sell to CTOs for a little bit and just learn a totally different personality type, not the charismatic more the analytical, whatever it be like, how do I swap and just wear that different hat? And there's a great drummer in a, in a nerdy band you'll never have heard of called Rush. Neil Per, he's not alive anymore, but his

drumming career, he's got a PhD in drumming. That's how, that's how good he was. But, part of his drumming career was he was drumming a certain way. And then in the hiatus of the band, they'd be off for a year. He'd go and just sit with a jazz drummer for a year and a totally different style of playing drums and then bring that back and then go and learn another totally different style of drumming and come back. So it wasn't just, I'm comfortable in here's what I'm really good at. And just sticking with that. How do I be this well-rounded person?

Yeah. And the Stoics were great at this, weren't they? They had a life, had an arc to it. They'd be a soldier, a warrior, they'd be the poet, and then they'd end their life as the philosopher. But they'd have these different phases and chapters in their life. They wouldn't just be one person because specialism is for insects. Yeah. And I think like you talk about there, but like once you master the rule book, like once you really understand, okay, I can do all these things. That's when like an artist would.

That's when you can rip it up and say, okay, well now I'm going to kind of merge all these styles. I do think sales is sales or selling is so similar to music or art or whatever. It is an art form of learning how to communicate the materialistic stuff that you were talking about is so interesting as well, because I don't think I think employers see through it. I think

There are probably some employers that are in shortage that probably talk like that. And it's like, yeah, we all want to, if you come to the interview and you say you want a Rolex, you got the job. But I genuinely think that the majority, I remember going to an interview and we had to go around the room and me and another friend were in it. It was a group interview and it was like, why are you here? Why do you want to work in recruitment? I said, I've got a photo of a yacht on a wall and I've got a BMW on the wall and a Rolex. And it was not true.

I just wanted a job that paid well for a good company. And I wanted to like, feel like I'd done a good job at the end of the day. But I span this web of lies because that's what I thought sales was because of the war for Wall Street. And it was false and it was so fake and they saw through it. And I think so many salespeople get into it for the wrong reason. It's like, don't you don't need to play the game that everybody's playing. Play your own game because you create the rules. If you're trying to compete with

I'm trying to compete with you, we're playing different rules. Do you know what mean? So I can never win your game because you're the judge. So it's a case of create your own games, make your own rules and work to things that are going to better you as you go forward in life. Yeah. And I think the last, a little bit of practical advice here, but one thing that's helped me in my sales career and I've seen other people do this as well, really well, if you're part of a sales team and let's say you're working on deals or someone's booking meetings in a separate area for you and you feel like

lost my fire a little bit. Sometimes what you can do is just help someone else out in the team, which might sound weird, but it's just, Hey, can I do a few calls for you on what you're working on at the minute? Or can I jump in and look after those leads that have gone quiet for you or chase your deals up? And you can just play a slightly different game that gets you out of your own, your own head a little bit, but there's lots of really useful things to do. Um, and the last thing I'll round off on is really be honest with yourself. If you think the idea is I'm going to

move to another business and something's going to be different. Maybe that's going to be true. You have that quite honest look with yourself, look in the mirror with yourself of what if I get there and actually it's not, what do I do then? Do I just do this forever? Yeah. What are my expectations? So it goes back to expectations versus reality. Yeah. Really good. I've been Jack Frimston. I've been Zach Thompson. Remember you will die. Let me do an int of you.